For most people, including professionals and do-it-yourself property owners or property managers, cleaning up after painting can be quite a chore, especially if paint rollers were used.
Commonly, paint rollers include an inner tube and an outer nap secured to the inner tube by some adhesive. The nap of the roller is usually made of carpet like material, though there are many different materials available to provide a desired texture to the finished product, i.e. walls, ceilings. The usual paint applicator includes a revolvable cylinder that is inserted into the inner tube of the roller and a handle. There are several procedures available to clean a paint roller after it has been used. One is to remove the paint roller from the applicator and put it into a bucket of water and swish the roller around until it is clean or as close to clean as possible. The more common approach is to hose the roller off. This however, is time consuming and often very messy. Moreover, it is hard to do because while spraying one side of the roller the paint gets pushed around to the other side and then back again, and so on. That is the problem with cleaning a roller from the outside, unlike this invention which cleans the roller from the inside out.
Given the difficulties, many roller users simply throw away the roller and purchase a new one. Depending on the size and nature of the job, this approach can be very costly.
While closable storage devices are known, i.e. those suitable for storing a wet roller for a period of time against immediate dry-out by air, no devices are known, nor is there acquaintance with any patent literature, teaching a method and structure for cleaning specially designed paint rollers by using an inserted structure that sprays water perpendicularly outward through the nap of the roller to be cleaned.